James Drake

Paul Troubetzkoy was born in 1866 at Intra, on the shores of the Lake Maggiore in Italy, about sixty miles from Milan. His father was a Russian prince who had married American opera singer Ada Winans and settled in Italy. So the colourful world of Italian opera – centred on La Scala, made a strong impression on him from an early age. 

A bust of the legendary Russian opera singer, Fedor Chaliapin was modelled around 1898-1900 during Troubetzkoy’s visit to Russia. The sculptor was introduced to Chaliapin, then a young promising singer, by Savva Mamontov, a wealthy industrialist, art patron and a passionate theatre supporter. In a letter to the artist I.E. Bondarenko, Ilia Repin noted that Troubetskoy enjoyed listening to the singer and immediately started working on the bust: Troubetzkoy made two busts: one in painted plaster and the other in bronze’ (undated letter).

Troubetzkoy’s 1897 bronze portrait of Adelaide Aurnheimer (Fig 2) also known as Dopo il Ballo (After the Ball), is one of many which defines him as the ‘Singer Sergent of Sculpture’. She is dressed as the eponymous tragic heroine from Giacomo Puccini’s opera Manon Lescaut, premiered previously at the Teatro Regio in Turin. 

The fluidity of Troubetzkoy’s modelling technique suggests a portrait painter’s approach to sculptural form as he dabs clay with an impressionist’s touch which has encouraged comparisons with his contemporaries. Giovanni Boldini’s portrait of Lady Gertrude Campbell in the National Portrait Gallery, London (Fig 3) is one example; it evokes the elegance of the period and draws the viewer into the narrative, as if Lady Campbell had just glided onto a banquette at a grand ball. A similar example is John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw in the National Gallery of Scotland (Fig 4). In each case their long ball gowns create undulating forms that cascade from the bodies of the sitters. Such comparisons position Troubetzkoy as the pre-eminent sculptor of the fin-de-siècle high society.

The three great figures in early 20th Century opera, Puccini, Caruso and Toscanini, were all modelled by Troubetzkoy in 1912. 

When Troubetzkoy first arrived in Milan in 1884, Giacomo Puccini’s first opera was being staged. Puccini and Troubetzkoy became friends and were both influenced by other poets, writers, musicians and artists who were part of the so-called ‘Scapigliati’.

In the grounds of the villa at Torre del Lago where Giacomo Puccini spent the last 30 years of his life, on the shores of Lake Massaciuccoli, a lifesize statue of the composer smoking a cigarette, dominates the landscape. It is one of Troubetzkoy’s most iconic works. This was long before the link between smoking and cancer was identified. Sadly, Puccini died of complications of laryngeal cancer at only sixty-five.

The 1924 statue was based on Troubetzkoy’s 1912 cast of Puccini. Luigi Troubetzkoy recalls in his memoirs that he was called to the opera house by Toscanini who instructed him to send a telegram to his brother Paul to arrange a meeting to discuss the commission.

The sculptor depicted the legendary tenor Enrico Caruso in stage costume as Dick Johnson alias Ramerres in the Puccini opera “La fanciulla del West” (The Girl of the West). No doubt, he was inspired by photographs such as the one below taken during the performance. 

In this role, Caruso fully transitioned from verismo’s Sicilian peasant to a working-class rebel in the American mould. Puccini wrote to Caruso on 13 January 1911: “Tell me how Fanciulla is doing, if the crowds are flocking to it and if it is paying me well [..]. I salute you, O singer of many notes, and hope that the cheek of a fanciulla [girl] will lie on your breast […] A kiss to my Rodolfo [of La Bohème] and my extraordinary Johnson from him who wishes you well.”

The opera premiered on December 10, 1910 at the Metropolitan Opera Theater, New York. It was the first world premier the Met had mounted. They spared no expense in turning the premier into a glittering social occasion, giving ‘exclusive’ advance interviews with conductor Toscanini and composer Puccini. Tickets were sold for twice their normal price, and on the black market some seats sold for $150 – an astronomical sum in 1910. After the final aria ‘Addio, California’ there were no fewer than fifty-five curtain calls.

As depicted in Edith Wharton’s novel The Custom of the Country, the Met was THE place to be seen -and even to snare a husband. Listening to music took a back seat to social climbing. Little wonder then that the great socialite Paul Troubetzkoy chose this location and this performance for his bronze of Caruso.  The tenor, the composer and the sculptor were all at the height of their powers in 1910.

Paul Troubetzkoy mixed with celebrities of his day on both sides of the Atlantic. Among his best works were a small number of portraits of talented young women who achieved fame for their dancing abilities. Firstly his ‘Danseuse’ of 1910, then his 1914 Lady Constance Stewart Richardson depicted the notable Scottish dancer and suffragette (1883-1932) and finally his 1915 cast of Irene Castle. In each of these sculptures, the subject appears entirely wrapped up in their thoughts, unaware of the viewer. 

Troubetzkoy’s 1910 Danseuse was modelled on Thamara de Svirsky (1883-1972). De Svirsky was an international artist, pianist and dancer, appearing in many leading roles in the early 20th century and collaborating with Igor Stravinsky and Edvard Grieg. She was also known for dancing barefoot. “Her costumes are triumphs of sartorial amplitude,” declared one disappointed critic. “They leave everything to the imagination.”(1)

Of Russian origin, it was in Paris that she met Prince Paul Troubetzkoy when he left Russia in 1905. Following this meeting, he modelled Tamara with an energy, a fluidity and refinement which characterizes his work. 

American critics immediately recognised the quality and modernity of Troubetzkoy’s works, not least the art critic Charles L. Borgmeyer, who wrote about the bronze of Thamara: “(Standing) in front of the ‘Dancer’, who has abandoned her old-fashioned ballet skirt, removed her stockings, dancing without shoes or stockings, dressed only in loose and flowing draperies, one can only marvel at the charm and grace of this  small bronze figure; of the achievement of beauty in dance, an expression of art formulated in a universal language” (2).

 Lady Constance Stewart-Richardson was a flamboyant and charismatic woman of many talents. She was best known for her career as a barefoot classical dancer, an unheard of profession for a titled woman. Her revealing dance costumes caused uproar in Edwardian society.

In 1914 Paul Troubetzkoy modelled a bronze sculpture on Lady Constance observing: ‘it is rare that such exuberant vitality is combined with such perfect lines and grace of movement.’ ‘Describing his technique he said ‘I try to portray the spiritual, the abstract – the body animated by the spirit within, not the external features alone.’ In this work he captured the grace and tenacity of Lady Constance more accurately than any other artist.

Troubetzkoy’s bronze of Irene Castle was created a year later. As well as being one of the great celebrities of the early 20th C., Irene was a leading animal rights activist; Troubetzkoy of course was a committed vegetarian. Her life with husband and dance partner Vernon, who died as a fighter pilot in WW1, was later dramatized by Irving Berlin in ‘The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle’, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. 

This video clip of Vernon and Irene Castle from the silent film “Whirl of Life” recreates the 1912 Paris performances that attracted Troubetzkoy:

Gilbert Seldes penned this eloquent description of Irene in 1924 “No one else has ever given exactly that sense of being freely perfect, of moving without effort and without will, in more than accord, in absolutely identity with the music. There was always something unimpassioned, cool not cold, in her abandon; it was certainly the least sensual dancing in the world; the whole appeal was visual. It was as if the eye following her graceful motion across a stage was gratified by its own orbit, and found a sensuous pleasure in the ease of her line, in the disembodied lightness of her footfall, in the careless slope of her lovely shoulders. There was only dancing, and it was all that one ever dreamed of flight, with wings poised, and swooping down”.

His sculpture exhibits an expression of fixed concentration as she conducts her performance, which is balanced by an air of ethereality, created by her open pose and flowing gown. This loose style of dress would later be adopted by ‘the flappers’ and set a trend that would endure throughout the 1920’s. 

References

1 Edward F. O’Day, “Thamara de Svirsky Disappointed” San Francisco Daily Times (November 12, 1910): 8.

2 Charles L. Borgmeyer, Prince Paul Troubetzkoy – Sculptor, in Fine Arts Journal, Chicago, July 1911, p.13.

On the first floor of the magnificent Musée D’Orsay you will find an imposing bronze of Count Robert de Montesquiou, once the arbiter of elegance in Paris society. Appropriately it stands in front of a portrait of his contemporary Marcel Proust by Jacques-Emile Blanche. Paul Troubetzkoy’s 1907 cast highlights the subject’s haughty profile, his arched silhouette, his slender fingers and the intricate design of his outfit. 

Troubetzkoy was not alone in capturing this extraordinary dandy for posterity. His sculpture of the Count was a three-dimensional equivalent of coveted portraits by the Anglo-Hungarian Laszlo, the French La Gandara, the Americans Whistler and Singer Sergent, the Swiss Louise Breslau and the Italian Giovanni Boldini. The latter’s immortal portrait of the Count has him seated, in profile, the diagonal of his body counterbalancing that of his cane, in shades of gray.  

Montesquiou’s idiosyncratic behaviour was the stuff of dreams for a sculptor whose own life was no less quirky. At the beginning of any conversation, the dandy would remove one glove and launch a series of gesticulations, raising his hands towards the sky, lowering them to touch the tip of one perfectly buffed shoe, or waving them as though conducting an orchestra. It is said that Montesquiou would burst into the laughter of an hysterical woman, then clap his hand over his mouth to quieten himself. Most likely the reason for this abrupt gesture was that, despite his handsome physique, his teeth were small and black.

Perhaps the most vivid portrait of the Count appears in a delightful 1925 memoir by Elisabeth de Gramont: “Leaning on the railing of my upper balcony one bright spring morning, gazing down onto the Avenue I was suddenly struck by the appearance of a tall, elegant personage in mouse-gray, waving a well-gloved hand in my direction as he emerged swiftly from the green shadow of the chestnut trees into the yellow sunlight of the sidewalk. He must have been in an unusually conservative frame of mind that day to have appeared in mouse-gray. He might, likely as not, have turned up in sky-blue, or in his famous almond-green outfit with a white velvet waistcoat. He selected his costume to tone with his moods and his moods were as varied as the iridescent silk which lined some of his jackets.”

De Montesquiou’s place in contemporary literature is well-known: his idiosyncrasies have been immortalised in the shape of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s character Des Esseintes (A Rebours, 1884), Jean Lorrain’s Comte de Muzarett (Monsieur de Phocas, 1901), Henri de Régnier’s Vicomte de Serpigny (Le Mariage de Minuit, 1903), Edmond Rostand’s Peacock (Chanteclerc, 1907), and above all Marcel Proust’s Baron de Charlus (Remembrance of Things Past). More recently, in Julian Barnes’ prize-winning novel The Man in the Red Coat, Montesquiou was the ultimate example of the aristocrat-dandy. Even in childhood he was surrounded by exotic imagery: for example his grandfather kept rare white peacocks “roosting in a catalpa tree”. Léon Daudet wrote that the Count was an aesthete, one for whom ‘thought is less value than vision”. Daudet described him as being “ageless, as though varnished for eternity”, a description no less applicable to the magnificent sculpture by Paul Troubetzkoy.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), the famous playwright and Fabian socialist, was a devoted vegetarian like Troubetzkoy. They became firm friends, with the playwright modelled three times over twenty years.

The story begins with another great Shavian bust by the towering genius Auguste Rodin. The original plaster of Rodin’s bust was created in the sculptor’s Paris studio in 1906.

Shaw maintained that the Rodin bust was the only likeness that revealed his inner self. He explained that only Rodin could penetrate the “mask” of his sitter’s reputation. “Look at my bust, and you will not find it a bit like the brilliant fiction known as GBS. But it is most frightfully like me.”

Shaw said that Rodin worked quite slowly, “as if he were a river god building a wall in a garden for 3 or 4 francs a day”. “When he was in doubt he measured me with an old iron divider, and then measured the bust. If the nose was too long, he sliced a bit off it, and jammed the tip up to close the gap, with no more emotion of affection than a glazier putting in a window pane. If the ear was in the wrong place, he cut it off and slapped it into the right place, excusing the ruthless mutilations to my wife (who half expected to see the already terribly animated clay bleed) by remarking that it was easier than to make a new ear. Yet a succession of miracles took place as he worked. In the first 15 minutes, in merely giving a suggestion of human shape to the lump of clay, he produced so spirited a thumbnail bust of me that I wanted to take it away and relieve him from further labour […] but that phase vanished like a summer cloud as the bust evolved […] (then) it sobered down into a careful representation of my features in their exact dimensions. Then it reverted to the cradle of Christian art, at which point I wanted to shout “For Heaven’s sake, stop: it is a Byzantine masterpiece. Then it began to look as if Bernini had meddled with it. Then, to my horror, it smoothed out into a plausible, rather elegant piece of 18th C. work, almost as if Houdon had touched up a head by Canova. At this point Troubetzkoy would have broken it with a hammer, or given up with a wail of despair. Then another century passed in a single night, and the bust became a Rodin creation, and was the living head […] It was a process for the embryologist to study, not the aesthete […]”

Shaw paid Rodin the highest possible compliment when he predicted his own epitaph as: Shaw, Bernard: sculpted by Rodin, otherwise unknown! His assessment of Troubetzkoy (“the most amazing sculptor of modern times”) was coloured no doubt by flattery: after all, he sat for the Russian on three separate occasions. He also wrote that Troubetzkoy was a “gigantic humanitarian who could do anything with an animal except eat it.”

Shaw observed that “when Troubetzkoy models an animal, be it the smallest spoiled pet, or an exhausted draft horse, in whose body one can see all the pains of the ill-treated animals who died without knowing human pity; or the horse subjugated by the terrible Czar, which stands out irresistibly in the great square of Leningrad, among the spaces left empty by the conventional monuments, swept away by the exasperation of the Soviets, so perfect is the result, so adherent to nature, such the impression that is aroused by its power of representation, to be compelled by us to conclude that his sculpture – like Barye’s – is created to model only, and nothing else, animals.”

Shaw knew of course that animal sculptures were just a small part of the Russian’s oeuvre. He knew that the sculptor would be remembered primarily for his busts and his statues of high society figures in Paris and London, impeccably dressed. So his legacy would be as the Singer Sargent of sculpture – in Shaw’s words “discovering the “quintessence of elegance in the draping of a skirt, in the head and arms of an archduchess”.

At the same time, Shaw recognised that Troubetzkoy’s genius transcended a mere society portraitist in clay. He pointed out that, when his countrymen from Lake Maggiore asked him for a memorial of the great war, Troubetzkoy placed, in the long lake of Pallanza, where he once lived beside the famous Villa Cabianca rock, a simple figure of a mother, who tends her child and asks: “Do you want to see my son?”

The first Troubetzkoy bust, in 1908, was created after the Russian saw the Rodin bust. He declared that there was no life in the eyes, and felt that he could do better. In five hours of frenzied work in the London studio of John Singer Sargent he produced his own bust of Shaw. (This was at the house in Tite Street, Chelsea which is still opposite the house where Oscar Wilde lived). Shaw remembered it as “a delightful and wonderful performance. He worked convulsively, giving birth to the thing in agonies, hurling lumps of clay about with groans, and making strange, dumb movements with his tongue, like a wordless prophet. He covered himself with plaster. He covered me with plaster. And, finally, he covered the block he was working on with plaster to such purpose that, at the end of the second sitting, lo! there stood Sargent’s studio in ruins, buried like Pompeii under the scoriae of a volcano, and in the midst a spirited bust of one of my reputations, a little idealized (quite the gentleman in fact) but recognisable a mile off as the sardonic author of Man and Superman, with a dash of Offenbach, a touch of Mephistopheles, and a certain aristocratic delicacy and distinction that came from Troubetzkoy himself, he being a Russian prince. I should like to have that bust; but the truth is that my wife couldn’t stand Offenbach-Mephistopheles; and I was not allowed to have the bust […]” (This explains why only the Rodin bust greets visitors to Shaw’s Corner in Hertfordshire).

Many years later Shaw went to Troubetzkoy’s studio in Verbania, Italy for full body sculptures. His visits to Lake Maggiore were to have a profound influence on his later plays, but it was not just the magical scenery that stimulated his creative imagination.

In the late Summer of 1921, an American girl, Molly Tompkins, came to London for the express purpose of meeting the great playwright. Shaw bumped into her outside his house in Adelphi Terrace and invited her in for ‘buttered crumpets’. She explained that, with her husband Laurence, she wanted to create a Shavian theatre. Although he found Molly ‘as vain as a goldfish’, her eagerness “softened my stony heart a little”. He realised that Molly brought out qualities he shared with Henry Higgins in Pygmalion. No surprise therefore that he saw something of Eliza Doolittle in her, and sent her for lessons in diction with Professor Daniel Jones at London University.

When Molly and Laurence went to Italy in Spring 1926, she invited George Bernard Shaw to join them. On the 5th of August he and his wife Charlotte arrived at the Regina Hotel at Stresa, overlooking Lake Maggiore. They were enlivened by local residents including the conductor Albert Coates and his wife Dooshka – a ‘Prima Donna from Moscow’. Fellow guests included Cecil Lewis who later shared an Oscar for the screenplay of Shaw’s Pygmalion.

Shaw spent his time ferrying across the lake to sit for Prince Paul Troubetzkoy who had a ‘big studio’ and an “astonishing wife”. Shaw posed for a statuette showing him seated in July 1926. One of the stops on the lake was the tiny island of San Giovanni, which was being rented by Molly Thompkins. ‘I cannot tear myself away from the Isola Molli’ wrote Shaw, who went on excursions with her to Baveno.

The following year Shaw returned to the Regina Palace – once again to pose for Troubetzkoy.

Shaw described how he took up his ‘platform pose as an orator’ when he gave ‘twenty sittings, or rather standings’ for the final portrayal at Troubetzkoy’s studio. Only one bronze cast was made from it. It captures the combative nature of a subject with an opinion on everything, whose moustache bristles as he contemplates a suitable repartee. He was only upset that it was not exhibited at the National Gallery of Ireland during his lifetime. He accepted the (then) rule that only portraits of deceased subjects were displayed.

Shaw claimed to have saved the sculptor from despair over the 1927 death of his wife Elin Sundström by agreeing to return to Verbania for the final sitting. However, it was also a convenient excuse to meet Molly Thompkins at the Isolino San Giovanni. She left an indelible mark on his creative output. Molly and her “love-island” lingered like a sea-fantasy over his last plays and continued to haunt his memory. ‘The restless hands sometimes tire of the pen and remember the road to Baveno’ he wrote her: ‘…angels will always love you, including George Bernard Shaw’!

References

1 Shaw: An Autobiography 1898 – 1950, selected from his writings by Stanley Weintraub

2 Paul Troubetzkoy by George Bernard Shaw